The advent of global communications networks such as the Internet has provided alternative forms of communicating worldwide. Additionally, it has increased the speed at which communications can be sent and received. Not only can written or verbal messages be passed through the Internet, but documents, sound recordings, movies, and pictures can be transmitted by way of the Internet as well. As can be imagined, inboxes are being inundated with countless items. The large volume can more than difficult to manage and/or organize for most users.
In particular, a few of the more common activities that a user performs with respect to email, for example, are: sorting of new messages, task management of using messages that can serve as reminders, and retrieval of past messages. Retrieval of recent messages can be more common than older messages. Traditional systems employed today support at least some aspect of these three activities using folders such as an inbox, task-oriented folders, and user-created folders, respectively. However, this as well as other existing approaches present several problems. The folders make stark divisions between the three activities which are not conducive or coincident with user behavior, in general. For example, tasks are not visible to the user, or rather are “out of sight, out of mind”, and thus can be easily, if not frequently, neglected, overlooked, or forgotten. In addition, in many current systems any given message can only be in one folder at a time. Hence, the particular message cannot serve multiple activities at once. Other current systems have attempted to ease these problems, however, they fall short as well for similar reasons.